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Remembering the victims of Iran’s ‘death commission’

Kaveh Shahrooz was only 8 when his uncle was killed. He found out when his mother got a phone call that told her she should pick up his few possessions from the jail outside Tehran.

“We don’t know where he was buried,” says Shahrooz. “We suspect it was in a mass grave. We weren’t even allowed to hold a public funeral.”

Now a Toronto lawyer, Shahrooz has never forgotten the horror of the summer of 1988, when Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decreed that every political prisoner would be retried. Shahrooz’s uncle Mehrdad, barely out of his teens, had his sentence overturned — and it went from 10 years to immediate execution.

On Saturday, Shahrooz is one of dozens of bereaved Canadian relatives who will mark the killing of up to 7,000 Iranian prisoners in mass executions over a period of three months. In the 1980s, the revolutionary regime killed tens of thousands of men, women and children in a campaign of terror aimed at eradicating dissent.

At the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, politicians from the three major parties will speak, and Iranian artists and activists will take part in the commemoration.

“This will mark the first anniversary of the day of solidarity for political prisoners that was announced last June by the Canadian Parliament,” said Reza Banai, one of the organizers and a member of Massacre88, which seeks justice for the dead prisoners, as well as thousands of others who died in the 1980s.

Another commemoration will be held at 7 p.m. on Sept. 20 in the North York library, where a survivor will speak.

Nina Toobaei, a Toronto businesswoman, will be there to commemorate her 18-year-old brother Siyamak, who was seized by the clerical authorities in 1988, in his last year of high school. His jail sentence wasn’t changed to execution, but he fell victim to a cruel plot.

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“They let him go home on a break to visit his family, because they wanted to see how people were escaping and who was helping them. So the guards told him he could go to the store for my mother and (they) let him ‘escape,’ but they kept him under surveillance.”

The anxious family later received a letter postmarked Pakistan, saying that Siyamak had joined the mujahedeen fighters. “We were so happy he’d got away. But we heard nothing more from him.”

They clutched at shreds of hope for 17 years. Then Toobaei read in a book by a prison survivor that her brother had been rearrested, jailed and killed — a memory that still brings her to tears.

Those who suffered such losses in the early years of the Islamic Republic do not expect change to come any time soon, in spite of the election of a more liberal president, Hassan Rouhani.

“I do human rights work on Iran,” said Shahrooz, “and what I’ve seen is further repression. There are executions and naming of known human rights violators to the cabinet. None of that gives reason for optimism.”

As a primary schoolboy, Shahrooz was taken by his mother to Gohardasht prison, west of Tehran, to visit his imprisoned uncle. He slipped through a back entrance to hug him, while other family members were kept behind a glass barrier.

“He was in bad shape, and he had lost the use of one arm. I was too young to understand what was happening. He had done nothing except distribute leaflets and go to meetings. But he was tortured and then killed.”

Like thousands of others, Mehrdad was condemned by the so-called “death commission,” a panel of officials from the intelligence ministry, judiciary and prosecutor’s office, who held mock trials that lasted only a few minutes.

One of the commission members is now a minister in Rouhani’s cabinet. Another, Esmail Shooshtari, was an investigator of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi’s murder in Evin Prison.

To this day, the Iranian government denies the mass killings of political prisoners. But last year the Canadian Parliament recognized the 1988 murders as a crime against humanity, opening the way for prosecutions of suspected perpetrators in Canada under universal jurisdiction, which aims to end impunity for those who would otherwise evade justice.

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